As always the Hugo House Cafe offers a variety of drinks to keep you well hydrated throughout the evening. We'll continue to have books for sale — so bring some cash!

The reading is FREE and open to the public. Co-sponsored with Richard Hugo House.

More on this month's readers below:

Heather McHugh is a dual citizen of Canada and the US, and a resident of Washington state. She has been teaching at the UW since 1983, and before that she taught ten years elsewhere. Her most recent collection of poems is Upgraded to Serious, from Copper Canyon; she's done seven or eight poetry collections, a lot of translations; and a collection of essays called Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. In 2000 she was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2009 was named a John D and Catherine T MacArthur fellow.

Johnny Horton teaches writing and American Lit at Seattle Central Community College. He's published poems or recently had poems accepted by Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review, Fourteen Hills, The Laurel Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Seattle Review and other magazines. He's been the recipient of a Washington Artist Trust GAP grant and residency fellowships from The Espy Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2009 and 2010 he co-directed the University of Washington's summer creative writing program in Rome.

Rachel Welty is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Washington. Rachel is one of those girls who is defined by her lovers, among them: King David, George Herbert, William Carlos Williams, Martha Stewart, and NPR's Paula Poundstone. Even though William Carlos Williams once advised her, “no ideas but in things!” old habits die hard; she can't stop writing on abstract ideas, among them: verbing proper nouns, prayer, the midwest, and HOME.

Anca Szilágyi is a Brooklynite living in Seattle. Her stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Western Humanities Review, and The Antigonish Review, among other publications. Chocolate pudding has fueled the writing and rewriting of much of her first novel. She is a second-year MFA candidate in prose.

Monday, January 17, 2011

New year, same fabulous reading series! First year fiction writer Valerie Arvidson kicked off 2011 with a series of short narratives based off of old family photos; first year poet Peter Moench shared with us his love of toasters and Abraham Lincoln; second year fiction writer Ben Wirth showed the audience the ups and downs of the dangerous world of gambling; UW alumna and poet Sierra Nelson invoked Groucho Marx and took the audience on a "choose your own adventure"; and UW creative writing faculty member Maya Sonenberg closed out the evening with two experimental short fiction pieces.